Hudson, sir. He's Hicks.

I had planned to skip Prometheus and just wait for the dvd, but then discovered that it's still running in Montreal and, hey, it's in good old 2D, so I gave it a try. Sigh...

I still find it strange that Hollywood today can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on films with scripts that barely exist. Why am I supposed to care about these characters again? Shouldn't they at least behave slightly logically? In Alien you could actually believe in the characters, the same with Aliens. Another thing: why didn't they give Noomi Rapace a Swedish name to explain her accent? One of  the other characters had a Scottish accent after all. Why should all characters in films taking place in the future sound like Americans? What happened to Europe? There's no IKEA in 2099?

Saturdays

Probably the wisest thing I did on arriving in Montreal was buying a bycycle. I got one used for 60 dollars. The guy in the bike store said he would buy it back for the same price when I leave. Not sure if he will keep his word, but even if I only get 40 dollars it will be worth it. Biking around in town is much better than taking the subway, like I did the first week.

Mostly I bike up to Rue Mont-Royal for a coffee and checking out some used bookstores before moving on down to Parc La Fontaine for some reading and quality squirrel watching time. Square Saint-Louis is also nice. I discovered a bookstore I hadn't seen before on Milton Street, The Word Bookstore. Amazon has ruined a bit the joy of bookbrowsing, but still...

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Paths of Glory

Point Blank

Happy Hank Day!

For Jane

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

Charles Bukowski

(August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994)

So, yeah...

...has this become a boring blog, or what? I'm talking about pancakes and squirrels for chrissakes. And now...

Bagels!
How did I ever survive earlier in my life without a toaster? I dunno. I've gotten hooked on Montreal style bagels. With cream cheese they're dangerously good. Gonna miss them when I go back to France.

and Hoarding!
I thought I was so above reality tv shows. It was something that didn't interest me at all. But I've gotten hooked, again, on a show called Hoarding: Buried alive. It's about people who fill their house with what they consider valuable objects that to everyone else is just garbage. I can't help but watch, probably because I recognize a part of myself in these people. It's never gotten that bad, luckily, but I can see the strange comfort in surrounding yourself with stuff.

Okay, back to drawing cats and dogs dressed up in clothes.

R.I.P. Joe Kubert

The man sure knew how to use a brush. I will try to spend the rest of the day looking heroically out of the corner of my eyes, like a Kubert character.

Squirrels

The cat beneath the tree in my backyard is back, looking up at the squirrel. It might be an other cat. It might be an other squirrel. The best place for squirrel-watching in Montreal is probably Parc La Fontaine. Except the benches all have Fresh Paint notes on them. I saw a white squirrel there the last time.

I long for the days of waking up by the chirping of birds. Now it's by carpenters in a neighbor house, starting hammering and electric saws at 8 in the morning. There should be a law...

The book: Getting closer to the end. It's around 25 half finished pages left. Hope to have it done by the end of the month or early September. There's still some details and backgrounds + colour penciling left on the pages back in France. Also the covers and endpapers. But hopefully it should all be finished and scanned by the end of October.

Dark Knight Rises

So, I went to see Dark Knight Rises. The difficult third film... Ok, it's not as bad as Spider-Man 3 or X-Men 3, but it was disappointing compared to The Dark Knight. I thought the two first films were good, but ruined by dragged out, chaotic third acts. If I re-watch the second film, I usually just turn it off after The Joker in nurse uniform scene. The third film I found to be the opposite of this. The two first acts of the film are pretty dull and clunky, and then it's saved by the quite exciting last act. Nothing as memorable as the pencil scene or The Joker sticking his head out of the cop car window, though.

It's a problem in the Nolan films, all the exposition. There are seldom people talking the way actual people do.There's also a self indulgence creeping into the later films, possibly because people are throwing money at him. I almost wish he would go back to the low budget film making of Memento, his best film in my mind. I don't think Inception would have lost much if he had been forced to cut the silly James Bond stuff. Still, at least this last Batman film has a personality, it's not a safe, by committee-film, no matter how much of a mess it is.

Rushmore

five easy pieces